A brush with... Anne Imhof
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What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
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hello i'm ben luke and welcome to a brush with the podcast from the art newspaper in which i talk to artists about their influences from writers to musicians and of course other artists and the cultural experiences that have shaped their lives and work and this episode is a brush with anna imhoff who's primarily known for her epic durational performances involving diverse collectives of dancers musicians and actors Their movement, speech and song is built from often fragmentary gestures and informed by a wealth of sources as well as the innate expertise of the performers themselves, which Anna harnesses to choreograph tableaux of rich affective power. A reflection on and of contemporary societal conditions, these works are also profoundly engaged with cultural and performance traditions, from the languages and forms of contemporary dance and ballet to rock concerts and to art history.
and Anna's practice extends far beyond performance, involving painting and drawing, sculpture and sculptural installation, and film. In each language that she adopts, Anna overtly engages her audience, and particularly their bodies, whether that's in the mode of address of her performance works, in sculptures that evoke barriers or surveillance mechanisms, or in paintings that overwhelm the viewer in their scale and the gravity of their imagery. Anna was born in 1978 in Gießen in Germany and today lives between Berlin and New York. She studied first at the Hochschule für Gestaltung in Offenbach in Germany between 2000 and 2003 but it was outside of the art school that the formative events that shaped her practice took place.
She became part of the club and music scene in Offenbach and even worked as a bouncer at a local club called Robert Johnson, where the piece that's regarded as her first major statement took place. Duel from 2001 consisted of a characteristically dramatic playoff between two disciplines, boxing and music. Other early works include videos in which Anna is the protagonist, like Maria from 2002, in which she films herself performing to camera while fragments of the soundtrack to West Side Story play in the background. Later, Anna attended the influential art school the Städelschule in Frankfurt, where she shaped her art practice while preserving the urgency and intensity of the Frankfurt music scene.
Her first major institutional exhibition was at the Porticus in Frankfurt, and features videos relating to live works. In this ongoing aspect of her practice, films are not merely documentation of performances, but equally valued. The exhibition also included drawings, some of which were shown on the ceiling of the gallery, an early example of her ongoing strategy of subverting methods of display. Her next institutional show was at MoMA PS1 in New York in 2015, where elements of the performance and installation included live rabbits and troughs of buttermilk. The title of the piece was Deal, and the underlying theme was value and exchange, with its inevitable bodily, societal and metaphorical implications.
In Angst, first presented in Basel and later in Berlin in 2017, Anna honed this combination of performance, architecture, painting and sculpture in a piece that was the first to use the term opera to describe its multifaceted elements. They included another live animal, this time a falcon, as well as musical and choreographic elements that built an interface between the viewers and the various enigmatically named characters at the heart of the piece, including the lover, the diver and the spitter. Notably, in the post-Stadel-Schuler works, Anna was no longer a performer. Instead, she was developing a loose collective with the musician Billy Bull Teal, the choreographer Josh Johnson, and especially the artist and musician Eliza Douglas of particular prominence.
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Chapters
7 chapters
1
What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
0:03–3:59
2
What influences have shaped Anne Imhof's artistic practice?
3:59–14:03
3
How does Anne Imhof incorporate movement and collaboration in her performances?
14:03–24:29
4
What role does improvisation play in Anne Imhof's work?
24:29–34:48
5
How does Anne Imhof's background in drawing inform her art?
34:48–44:58
6
What significance do animals have in Anne Imhof's performances?
44:58–54:55
7
How does Anne Imhof engage with the viewer's experience in her art?
54:55–1:02:27